Quotes About Perseverance

But farmers are patient men tried by brutal seasons, and if they weren't plagued by dreams of generation, few would keep plowing, spring after spring.

Nothing in the years to come can do worse than she was ready to do to herself.

To hope, which finds roots in the most infertile of soils.

A good businessman is hard to bruise and quick to heal.

The Japanese will not crack. They will not crack morally or psychologically or economically, even when eventual defeat stares them in the face. They will pull in their belts another notch, reduce their rations from a bowl to a half bowl of rice, and fight to the bitter end. Only by utter physical destruction or utter exhaustion of their men and materials can they be defeated. That is the difference between the Germans and the Japanese. That is what we are up against in fighting Japan.

It took Drake more than a year to find someone to drill his well. One salt-well driller after another refused him or failed to appear when promised. His standards were high.

a Tennessee Eastman employee was moved to immortalize anonymously in verse: In order not to check in late,2236 I've had to lose a lot of weight, From swimming through a fair-sized flood And wading through the goddam mud. I've lost my rubbers and my shoes Perpetually I have the blues My spirits tumble with a thud Because of all this goddam mud. It's in my system so that when I cut my finger now and then Instead of bleeding just plain blood Out pours a stream of goddam mud.

Across the next two years, they drilled one disappointing hole after another.

Then, just in time, as in all good melodramas, Dammam No. 7 came through: on 4 March 1938, while the Socal board was still deliberating, No. 7, at a depth of 4,725 feet, started flowing at 1,585 barrels a day. Three days later, the flow was up to more than twice that volume, to 3,690 barrels, and to 3,810 barrels by the end of the month.

Rose Bethe, who was then twenty-four, understood instantly. "My wife knew vaguely what we were talking about," says Bethe, "and on a walk in the mountains in Yosemite National Park she asked me to consider carefully whether I really wanted to continue to work on this.

Walk on, walk on With hope in your heart And you'll never walk alone

I work to support my habit of writing.

The boy who first entered a classroom barely able to speak English, twenty years later concluded his studies in the stately quiet of the reading room in the British Museum. Thus with one sentence I can summarize my academic career. It will be harder to summarize what sort of life connects the boy to the man.

start working- rarely resting- seemingly driven by a fatalistic sense that work that has to be done was best done as quickly as possible.

Only hour by hour gratitude is strong enough to overcome all temptations to resentment.

It is no surprise that the first and always unwelcome message of male initiation rites is LIFE – IS – HARD.

to live and work in the Light so that the darkness does not overcome us. If we have a pie-in-the-sky, everything-is-beautiful attitude, we are in fact going to be trapped by the darkness because we

You do not have to see the sun to know that it is still shining.

Three steps forward, two steps back.

you learn how to recover from falling by falling! It is precisely by falling off the bike many times that you eventually learn what the balance feels like. The skater pushing both right and left eventually goes where he or she wants to go. People who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off balance, while not realizing it at all. That is why they are so hard to live with.

As Rilke put it, "When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.

Be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing. —T.S. ELIOT, "East Coker" from the Four Quartets

She gave him a smile in which hope and knowledge were going at it, bare-knuckled, equally and eternally matched.

When my nose finally stops bleeding and I've disposed of the bloody paper towels, Teddy Barnes insists on driving me home in his ancient Honda Civic, a car that refuses to die and that Teddy, cheap as he is, refuses to trade in.